How Matt Damon is Fighting for Clean Drinking Water Around the World

"Let me give it to you from my perspective," Matt Damon says. We're sitting on a couch in a Los Angeles studio, talking about lofty things: celebrities and their social causes, what he calls his own "journey to philanthropy," and how it led him in 2009 to co-found the global nonprofit Water.org.

"Look, you've been told your whole life, as my friends and I have been told, that it is incumbent on you to be a good citizen and to help where you can," says Damon, whose mother (an early childhood education professor) shared that imperative with him when he was in high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, taking him on service trips to Mexico and Guatemala. "It really was a gift. It gave me an understanding early on of a world that was bigger than mine.

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"I have my family, I have my career, and I have this," Damon says of his commitment to Water.org.

"And then I became famous," he says. "It's surreal to suddenly wake up one day and have a larger sphere of influence than you ever anticipated. You genuinely want to do good in the world, but you're going to make a lot of missteps."

He did. "People started asking me to come to this gala or that. And then I would find my name associated with things that I didn't know anything about. I didn't want to be somebody at whom people rolled their eyes, thinking, What is he doing, getting into the middle of this kind of stuff? And that's why, once my life stabilized a little—my career was going pretty well, my wife was pregnant—I decided to get very serious about one thing."

Cedric Buchet

The celebrity gods were watching. In 2006, after Good Will Hunting, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ocean's 11, and the first two Bourne movies—the films that turned him into the closest thing we have to an old-school movie star—Damon was invited by Bono's organization, DATA (which preceded ONE), on a trip through Africa to study issues of extreme poverty. It was a "wonderful thing they did," he says, "almost like a two-week college minicourse, with field trips, lectures, and so much information. My head was spinning."

Finding His Cause

But one issue kept coming up, he says. "Water. It was massive. It seemed to undergird everything. Water and sanitation." He laughs. "Water was described to me by the people at DATA as the least sexy of all the philanthropic causes. And then you add in sanitation. Just in case water is not unsexy enough, let's bring shit into it!"

The policy wonk's shorthand for water, sanitation, and hygiene is WASH, and let's just say the subject of toilets and waste management can be a hard sell at a fundraising party. But it's a challenging sell at the individual, grassroots, level, too, simply because anyone raised in the developed world can't truly fathom how life-changing the lack of a toilet can be.

"We all have family members or friends we've lost to cancer or to AIDS," Damon says. "But sanitation is something we solved here 100 years ago. Maybe we have some vague recollection of a grandfather or great-grandfather who talked about going to the outhouse."

Klara Glowczewska

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For the 2.5 billion people without sanitation facilities—one third of the earth's population—it can mean humiliation and, for women and girls especially, danger (men watching and rape). Many, as a result, avoid eating and drinking for long periods of time, which has spiraling health repercussions.

Lack of access to uncontaminated water is likewise tough to relate to if you live in a place where water is ubiquitous. "We don't know anyone who goes thirsty," Damon notes. "We have faucets everywhere. Our toilet water is cleaner than what 663 million people drink. The crisis in Flint, Michigan, ironically, is one of the first times, at least in my memory, that Americans have become aware of just how necessary clean water is, and the dire consequences of not having it."

"I wanted to do something that really leveraged my celebrity—projects that worked on the first day and 10 years later."

Women in impoverished areas around the world spend hours each day navigating difficult landscapes to find water or standing in long lines to buy expensive plastic bags of it from vendors (collectively, 125 million hours every day, it has been estimated). Children (especially girls, who always share that burden) miss school and so compromise their futures. There is rampant disease.

"One child dies every 90 seconds from water-borne illnesses," Damon tells me. "It's completely insane. But beyond just senseless death, this is robbing people of their humanity, of their hopes and dreams. And also of simple day-to-day things, like a kid having time to play."

Using His Celebrity

Perhaps Damon's own sex appeal makes up for his cause's lack of it, but in the seven years since he and water expert Gary White formed Water.org, the results have been impressive. By the end of 2015, Water.org-funded programs reached 4 million people with water and sanitation improvements. "And we're going to reach another million more this year," Damon says, clearly loving the rate at which the numbers are growing.

Institutional investors have certainly taken note of the organization's innovative approach to the crisis. The behemoth Ikea Foundation, as well as the charitable arms of Caterpillar, Cartier, Bank of America, Conrad Hilton, and Stella Artois, among others, are donors and strategic partners. "And we're working on individual high-net-worth investors and the grass roots," says Damon.

"And the five-year plan for people helped?" I ask White. "We're still working on the precise figures," he says, "but it's going to be in the tens of millions."

"Our solutions work," Damon says emphatically. "If we can just tell that story."

A few days after my meeting with Damon in L.A., I'm joining White in Indonesia, one of the 12 countries where Water.org currently has projects, to see its solutions in action. Traveling with us are several staffers and major donors, including Per Heggenes, the CEO of the Ikea Foundation (which just announced a $15 million grant to the nonprofit).

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Damon normally takes at least one such field trip a year, but he is regretfully sitting this one out—he has two weeks left of shooting on the fifth Bourne film, Jason Bourne, in theaters July 29. ("I'm already not very popular with my family this year," says the father of four daughters.)

Our four-day itinerary includes visits to five villages on the island of Java, around Jakarta and the city of Semarang, and meetings with community organizations and local financial institutions with which Water.org has partnered. It's pretty here, in the hot and humid Javanese countryside at the tail end of monsoon season—lush vegetation, graceful traditional rooftops, small brightly painted mosques.

Indonesia is southeast Asia's largest economy and is considered a "lower middle income" nation; driving along you can't tell that 15 percent of the country's 250 million people lack access to safe water, and 40 percent don't have adequate sanitation.

Klara Glowczewska

White is an engineer, and he thinks like one. A sort of Steve Jobs of the water crisis, he sees the world's WASH problems as equations that need to be analyzed, taken apart, and solved in previously unimagined ways if the large-scale changes he and Damon envision are to happen. Which doesn't mean that the problems are any less heartbreaking when reduced to numbers. No matter how fast you dig wells, or pump or filter water, it is still just a drop of help in a vast ocean of need.

It has been estimated that $200 billion in charitable donations over five years would be required to solve the global WASH crisis; the aid community invests $8 billion annually. The math says it all. There will never be enough.

"Our toilet water is cleaner than what 663 million people drink."

"Half of all water projects around the world fail in the first three years," Damon told me, "and that's a staggering statistic." What is called "direct impact solutions" to the crisis—wells, pumps, filters, water purification tablets, and such—don't last.

Wells silt over, fancy pumps and filters break down, and there aren't the spare parts or the local expertise to fix them. Furthermore, those most affected by lack of WASH—people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP—acronyms rule in the nonprofit world)—might neglect, amid all the complications in their lives, to pop that water purification pill into the jerry can, or to walk the five miles to a distribution point for a fresh supply.

Cedric Buchet

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Both Damon and White were doing versions of direct impact before they met up, White with his first nonprofit, Water Partners International, and Damon with H2O Africa, which he founded after his trip with Bono's organization. "We raised a good amount of money, and we funneled it to NGOs doing good work with wells," Damon says of H2O Africa. "But then I started thinking, Well, okay, this is good. But I feel like I'm not maximizing the impact that I can have, not really leveraging my celebrity."

Changing the Game

At about the same time, White was having an epiphany: Not all the 2.5 billion WASH-disenfranchised poor are equally poor. A large portion of them can pay for improvements, if they can get loans. And loans are empowering: By taking them out, as opposed to accepting aid, these people are transformed from passive recipients to active participants in finding their own solution—be it a plumbing connection to an existing underground system, a connection to a reservoir, this kind of toilet or that kind, or a well, but this kind and not that kind, and situated here and not there. Therefore, White concluded, "We need to help the poor tap into their power as customers and citizens and meet us halfway," he says.

"Gary's amazing innovation, which he called WaterCredit," Damon says, "is that he dragged microfinance into the realm of water and sanitation. He said—and it was simple and really brilliant—'What if we fronted the poor the money they need to connect to the existing infrastructure where it exists?' That is many millions of people." Others, White hypothesized, could still be helped through charity and subsidies.

So in 2009, Damon and White joined forces ("I telephoned Ben Affleck, but he didn't return my calls," White quips), and on the foundation of WaterCredit, Water.org was born.

"Gary's simple premise is that the poor will repay water-related loans because they are already spending a lot on water, in money and in time. And that turned out to be incredibly insightful," Damon says.

"They are paying back at an astonishingly high rate—99 percent!" Almost all the borrowers are women. "They say that if you give the money to men, they will spend it on whiskey and women," Damon sighs. "As a man, I slightly take offense, but going through women seems to be what works."

Damon accompanies Water.org co-founder Gary White on one inspection trip a year, like this one to India in 2013. Right: At T&C's photo shoot in L.A.

Praveen Sundaram/Water.com; Cedric Buchet

Making a Difference

WaterCredit is not sexy, and it is definitely not photogenic, but everywhere we go in Java we see its power in action. In the village of Sukasirna, southeast of Jakarta, we visit with Siti Hasanah, a cheerful woman in her forties with two children, a 23-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. She wears a bright turquoise hijab and is immensely proud of her new luxuries: a water faucet jutting up from the ground in front of her nicely tiled front porch, and a private toilet and stall out back, which even her husband now deigns to use. (I'm imagining a thought bubble above her head: "Men!")

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She had both installed a year ago, paying for them with a $385, two-year loan, in her name, from KOMIDA, a local cooperative bank focused on low-income women. Many of her neighbors, Siti tells us, are following her lead, using borrowed money (globally the average loan size is $206) to improve their access to water and sanitation.

For 15 days each month, Siti tells us, she works from 6 a.m. until 3 p.m. in the rice paddies behind her house. When not in the fields she supplements her income by selling rocks (which her husband, a truck driver, gathers) and homemade snacks.

She has one year of payments left on her loan. Before these home improvements, she would take a steep path behind her house down to the small river flowing below. She insists on showing us precisely where. Slipping and sliding after her, I'm trying to imagine doing this multiple times a day.

Water.org's role in scenarios of this kind is covering the startup costs of financial institutions that give loans to women like Siti—finding them and helping them do market research and come up with appropriate loan structures. The group also provides engineering guidance.

And for all this, Water.org uses the money it receives from donors. (In 2015 they spent nearly $10 million in the field.) Ikea's Per Heggenes is a fan: "I have a business background, and what Water.org does makes sense. It's very solid, very different, very sustainable. I believe in people helping themselves, not in grants or aid."

In Java, White and his team are everywhere, like a dog on a bone—observing, noting, and questioning villagers, community groups, local engineers, and bank representatives. "I want to make sure we're doing everything the right way," he later explains. This is the point of these field trips.

The loans are employed differently depending on location and people's circumstances. In the village of Singajaya, which has no centralized water system to connect to, women have used loan money to put in their own backyard wells and toilets. In the village of Manggar Wetan, where traditional, high-ceilinged wooden homes (rural Javanese architecture is lovely) stretch single-file along a rutted dirt road facing vast rice paddies, the model is different.

Rather than make multiple loans to individual households, a bank offered a larger loan of $8,850 to a community-based organization to build a concrete reservoir tower and put in pipe connections to households willing to pay the $2 to $5 monthly hookup fee, which is used to pay back the debt.

Cedric Buchet

We talk to a strikingly pretty young woman named Dasila Turohmi, who has two children and a husband who is away for three months at a time for work. She points to the new faucet by her porch. Before, she rode a bicycle to and from a water source with a jerry can three times a day. "That's why I'm so slim," she says, smiling. What improvement would she like to see next? "For that road to be paved!"

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"No civilization, no society, no economy has ever developed without having a reliable source of water," White tells me over a drink on our last night in Indonesia. "It's the foundation. Yet so many people are living without it."

He taps his iPhone. "Matt and I want to innovate as much around this issue as Apple innovates around the next generation of the iPhone. Think of all the brain power and energy that go into getting the next version of this to market. If we can attract that caliber of attention to WASH, we'll be in really good shape.

"There is always going to be a power structure," he adds. "The wealthy will always get access to that precious resource that is water. Our job is to make sure that the poor have a level playing field."

"The water crisis affects girls and women disproportionately. Water collection falls on them."

To that end Damon has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. He feels she's qualified for a lot of reasons, "but just on this issue of water and sanitation: She understands it from a number of different angles—as a national security issue, as a human rights issue, and, obviously, its impact on women and girls. This is not a partisan issue, which is one really good thing about it. We've talked in equal parts to Republican and Democratic senators and congressmen."

As a template, Damon cites George W. Bush's 2008 initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which continues to be the cornerstone of U.S. global health efforts. "That's absolutely what we need. I've never spoken to Hillary about this, but from what she has done and what she has said, if she wins I'd like to believe that we at least would have an understanding ear. We're not selling snake oil, you know!"

One of the reasons Damon and White get along so well is that they are smart, cerebral men; for them solving the water crisis is a highly intellectual exercise. But I'm curious about the emotional impact. Has Damon ever felt joy in this work?

"That's a funny thing," he says. "There are fewer moments than if I was doing something much more specific at a local level. For me Water.org was always about maximizing impact. But I also have four daughters, and this is an issue for girls. And the people I talk to are girls, and sometimes the same age as my kids. So there is obviously going to be a connection there."

Cedric Buchet

Damon tells me about a 13-year-old in Haiti. There was a new water connection in her village, and he asked her if this would give her time to do more homework. "She looked at me and said, 'No, I won't be doing more homework! I'm the smartest kid in my class!' She said it in this great way so you knew it was true—she was the girl I was intimidated by in eighth grade." He laughs. "And I said, 'Well, what are you going to do with all this time?' And she looked me straight in the eye and said, 'I'm going to play.' It buckled my knees."

Despite the enormous challenges, Damon is hopeful that he will live to see the day when everyone has access to a clean drink of water and a toilet: "Part of Water.org's mission statement is to put ourselves out of business." Before I left for Indonesia he had said, "Look, you're going to meet a bunch of people—women, their kids. You're going to talk to them and you will feel the impact of what we do. But then imagine it over 4 million different people, and soon tens of millions."